Christou v. Beatport, LLC, 849 F. Supp. 2d 1055 (D. Colo. 2012), was a District Court of Colorado case in which the court held that MySpace friend lists could constitute trade secrets. While the names in the friend lists could be found in public directories, the court considered that the "ancillary information" of the friend list provided a means of contact with permission that was not publicly available.
Background of the case
During the 1990s, plaintiff Regas Christou founded several nightclubs in the Denver area, comprising the South of Colfax Nightlife District (known as “SOCO”). These clubs hosted live performances from DJs playing electronic dance music. In 1998, the defendant Bradley Roulier was employed by Christou as a talent buyer for booking A-list DJs at Christou's SOCO venues.
While employed under Christou, Roulier and other coworkers conceived the idea of Beatport, an online marketplace founded in 2003 after Christou had loaned an initial $50,000 in exchange for eventual partial ownership of the company. Christou continued to promote Beatport as it grew into the premier marketplace for electronic dance music. However, in March, 2008, Roulier left Christou's employment to found Beta Nightclub, and never fulfilled his promise of granting Christou partial ownership of Beatport.
Given the influence of Beatport in the electronic dance music marketplace and experiences of DJs canceling shows at his own SOCO clubs in exchange for rebooking at Beta, Christou alleged that Roulier used Beatport to coerce DJs into playing at Beta instead of one of his SOCO nightclubs. Christou filed a complaint to the District Court of Colorado seeking damages, suing Beatport for nine claims including unlawful tying in, attempted monopolization, and theft of a trade secret—the MySpace profile credentials used for connecting his SOCO clubs to DJs.
Opinion of the Court
On 14 March 2012, the court responded to the defendants' motions to dismiss each of plaintiff’s claims. The court dismissed Christou's individual antitrust claims but denied defendants Beatport's, Beta’s, and Mr. Roulier’s motions to dismiss the antitrust claims brought by plaintiffs The Church and Vinyl, as well as those plaintiffs’ claims for misappropriation of trade-secrets.
Trade Secret Misappropriation
To determine whether plaintiff’s MySpace profile was in fact a trade secret, the court consulted the analysis presented in Colorado Supply Co. v. Stewart, 797 P.2d 1303, 1306-07 (Colo. App. 1990): whether reasonable steps were taken to protect the secrecy and restrict access of the profile, whether employees knew customers' names from general experience, whether customers commonly dealt with more than one supplier, whether customer information could be readily obtained from public directories or other sources outside of plaintiff's business, and lastly whether the owner of the customer list expended great cost and effort over a considerable period of time to develop the files, and whether it would be difficult for a competitor to duplicate the information.
The court agreed with the plaintiff's argument that the profile was a "database" of contact information and permission to contact instead of a mere list of names: the profile not only held contact information for thousands of individuals self-identified as interested customers, but also served as the means (email addresses) and consent to notify and promote DJ performances directly to these potential customers with the authority of plaintiffs’ nightclubs. As a result, the court held that because the MySpace profile had been properly password protected to a select few of Christou's personnel, took great cost to develop, and provided the means and permission to contact instead of just a simple customer list of names, the profile could be held as a trade secret.
Moreover, because Roulier was aware of the password protection of the profile and did not reconstruct his own MySpace friend list to promote DJs, the court ruled that Beatport (Roulier) had knowingly misappropriated the trade secret when it used plaintiffs’ MySpace account to promote his competing nightclub as well as Beatport, citing the analysis used in Gates Rubber Co. v. Bando Chemical Indus. Ltd., 9 F.3d 823, 847 (10th Cir. 1993) -- that the defendant had a trade secret that was used without consent, and that the trade secret was obtained by improper means. The court also considered the public use of the trade secret, as Beatport had promoted itself using the plaintiff's MySpace profile, as grounds for Roulier's knowing of improper acquisition.